Foreign News: The Illustrious Unknown

Sadly the little man ran his eye over the cluttered warehouse yard. "The
court," he sighed, waving a hand, "of the illustrious unknown." Foreign
Ministry Official Sylva Poullin was knee-deep in statues: men of the
Second Empire with pointed goatees and spiked mustaches, Third
Republicans with voluptuous spade beards, poets, politicians,
schoolteachers and generals, the Roman god Mars and France's own
Marianne, her bronze face pushed in. Like many more famous works of
art, they had been patiently salvaged from Germany after the war by
France's conscientious Commission de Récupération Artistique, brought
back to Paris, and stored in an